"Alastair Reynolds - Spirey And The Queen (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

couldn't see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides:
Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning
tiger-heads. Generation thirty five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when
both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd
subsequent generations there'd been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum
logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armour, chameleoflage, quackdrive
powerplants and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We'd
tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but
they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which
was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.
Not that it really mattered now.
A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in.
Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept
holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso
tremor of the drumming ground.
Then steel gripped my shoulder.

She said we'd be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who
might be able to do something for Yarrow.
"If you weren't defecting," I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel
into the splinter's crust, "what the hell was it?"
"Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realised Tiger's
Eye didn't want us back." Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel
fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. "Which is when we
decided to head here."
"You almost made it," I said. Then added: "Where were you trying to get
home from?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
"Then you did defect."
"We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace."
In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. "It was a long-shot,
conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger's
Eye to say we'd been defecting."
"Bullshit."
"I wish."
"But you sent us."
"Not in person."
"But your delegate - "
"Could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own
execution as a traitor."
We paused to switch on our suit lamps. "Maybe you'd better tell me
everything."
"Gladly," Wendigo said. "But if this hasn't been a good day so far, I'm


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afraid it's about to go downhill."